Philip DeFranco Wants Others To Share In His Success

If you want to see how much DeFranco’s name means, take a look at his YouTube original channel, SourceFed, which buoyed by his own audience, is going to hit the 100 million view mark soon and has over 400,000 subscribers. Now, the subscriber count is only a fifth of his sxephil channel, which commands over 2 million, but most creators would love to have SourceFed’s numbers, which keep climbing and, remember, was launched a mere 5 months ago:

Now, not much is known about this network. The CNN Money article mentions that it will debut with a show on SourceFed and will showcase art and music and the like. It will give creators an audience that they would normally have to really fight for to get. DeFranco realizes that the best way to get a huge audience for a video is for a “tastemaker” to talk it up, and in the YouTube universe, DeFranco is exactly that.

This is tentpoling on a different level, and although I believe that the gesture is very much an unselfish maneuver on DeFranco’s part, he will benefit as well. He’s becoming a major player, but his ambitions seem to be focused in the digital space. He doesn’t look like someone who wants to jump to TV anytime soon, or become that kind of producer. From watching his daily show, I’m pretty sure he enjoys being able to make his show his way, and I think he wants the same for others.

This is the section from the article I think encapsulates the idea behind DeFranco’s network:

DeFranco is particularly critical of networks and third-party service providers that promise YouTube producers the big breakthrough but do not deliver. “You see all these people with their services, which for the most part take advantage (of content creators),” he complained.

He’s heard the tale of people being fed up with networks that tied them up with long-term contracts all too often – and has started to think about alternatives: “How do we bring up the next batch of YouTubers without hurting them? Without taking advantage of them?”

Which brings up another point: no one knows how to actually guarantee a “big breakthrough” on anything. All you can do, as DeFranco says in one his recent videos, “Plan for failure and hope for success.” I embedded this video in my recent article about YouTube’s tinkering, but this discussion at the 7:02 mark complements what is being said in the CNN Money article (warning – some bad language):

I think we’re going to see some new stars emerge from DeFranco’s network, and this is an exciting development.

Have Something to Say? We're listening!

Want to chime in on this article? Share your thoughts with us on Facebook or Twitter.